[TV] Kill your [TV]

{incoherent rant} Two months ago I had I 27" TV hooked up in my apartment. It dominated the main wall of my living space. It was the central frame of the room. All the furniture was situated around viewing angles.

It was gathering dust.

I'm not quite sure when it was that I realized it was a waste of time and valuable apartment real estate, but it only took me a couple of days to come to a conclusion of what to do with it.

I pitched it. Recycled it, actually, since CRT TVs have quite a lot of lead and other toxic chemicals in them.

I haven't had too much reason to regret my decsion. I kept a tiny 9" tv for emergencies, but it mostly resides in the back of a linen closet.

The state of television programs in the US is as bad as it has been at any point, perhaps no better or worse. To say the least, that is pretty lousy. Television has a grade average of about D+ most of the time. Sure, there might be a couple things that it does well, but most of the time it is just coasting, not living up to its potential as a medium.

First of all, television has been shortened to record-low times in the pursuit of more and more advertising time. Hour long shows now are only a little more than 40 minutes (I think the average is like 41 minutes now). One of the most compelling reasons to ditch your TV is to ditch the crappy adverts that break into your mental landscapes like a burglar in combat boots. If the bulk of Western civilization were selling anything I had any interest in buying, I might consider it a service. But they sell shit. Crappy worthless shit. Plus perscription drugs (for examples, see any evening national news program). They sell it using the most asinine and hackneyed techniques. There is no doubt that the people who write ads also write for television.

Second, most people consider cable TV a given now. $50-100 a month!? Are they kidding? Plus, a quick preview of what's on should tell you that cable TV is mostly more of the same crap the broadcast networks spout. I will not pay $60 a month for TCM and the Sci-Fi channel. My parent's recently got Dish Network, and mostly the only useful channel is the Sirius sattelite radio channels. Even that, as a stand-alone is $10 or $15 a month. Better to give that to Minnesota Public Radio, who actually play decent music.

Third, television programmers have shit for brains. I'd like to make a special shout out to the programming folks at FOX, who kill everything I love. FU Fox!

I mean seriously, Fox cannot market Arrested Development, probably the funniest show on television in a decade, and yet they'll cancel it and hope for lots of long term profits with 'Prison Break' (which has insufficient long-term prospects to warrant a miniseries, much less a series - let me give you a hint 'they break out and the show is over or they don't break out and you drag the show to death over rough asphault). Other networks fill their dead air with terrible soap operas that are almost more product placement examples and less actual story (boy meets girl, meetings and partings, TNA, numbskull beergut dads). Worst of all is when rank amateurs like J. J Abrams is given a bunch of shows and tons of people watch them, hoping he has some idea of where it is all going (he doesn't - see Alias post season 1 for proof). It isn't much better than this.

I'd normally bitch that broadcast TV cannot do scifi without cancelling it, but it actually seems like a couple networks have gone and done scifi this season. Too bad all the new shows look terrible. The networks want to replicate the success of the first five or six season of The X-Files (now, sadly, starting to look awfully dated), so they even retry Kolchak The Night Stalker, which the X-Files itself ripped off (and I should mention that the original Kolchak only lasted 20 episodes.) The only half-decent (and I am fearful that it really is only half) fairly new scifi is Battlestar Galactica on SciFi, which is better than the original but going in a very disconcerting direction. To confirm it, Hollywood is pretty much out of ideas, and anything new or cool will be killed swiftly (probably by Fox).

The FCC wants to sell off the multibillion dollar spectrum and have everyone switch to digital tv/hdtv. Then you can spend money to buy a digital tv or converter so you can watch hi def signals of shallow crap. $5000 for a plasma tv? I don't think so. Unplug instead. There is a whole world out there.

The benefits of ditching the tele as a foreground aspect of your life include the ability to take back your time and your ability to entertain yourself. Read a book. Play a musical instrument. Buy a puppy. Write something. See a play (plays are better than tv). Learn a skill. Seriously, at some point it is a good idea to stop bowing down to the altar of passive entertainment. You might even learn how to think for yourself again.

Plus it will free up some wall space.

{/ end of rant}